{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/posteriordb-testing-benchmarking-and","title":"posteriordb: Testing, Benchmarking and Developing Bayesian Inference Algorithms","arxiv_id":"2407.04967","date":"2024-07-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Måns Magnusson","Jakob Torgander","Paul-Christian Bürkner","Lu Zhang","Bob Carpenter","Aki Vehtari"],"abstract":"The generality and robustness of inference algorithms is critical to the success of widely used probabilistic programming languages such as Stan, PyMC, Pyro, and Turing.jl. When designing a new general-purpose inference algorithm, whether it involves Monte Carlo sampling or variational approximation, the fundamental problem arises in evaluating its accuracy and efficiency across a range of representative target models. To solve this problem, we propose posteriordb, a database of models and data sets defining target densities along with reference Monte Carlo draws. We further provide a guide to the best practices in using posteriordb for model evaluation and comparison. To provide a wide range of realistic target densities, posteriordb currently comprises 120 representative models and has been instrumental in developing several general inference algorithms.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04967v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.04967v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"posteriordb-testing-benchmarking-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/stan-dev/posteriordb","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"BSD-3-Clause"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2407.04967","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}